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Wake-Up-Your-Mouth Thai Cucumber Salad

This Wake-Up-Your-Mouth Thai Cucumber Salad is perfect as a side dish for any main dish with Asian flavors, and it's low-carb, South Beach Diet Phase One, and gluten-free with the right ingredient choices.

I'm a huge fan of Thai Cuisine, known for dishes that contain a balance of spicy, sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory (or Umami) flavors. I love how the many flavors work together so well in this Wake-Up-Your-Mouth Thai Cucumber Salad, even if some of the ingredients I've used are not authentically Thai. This light cucumber salad is a perfect side dish for grilled meat, seafood, or tofu, but I probably eat this most often as a quick main-dish salad for a very flavorful summer lunch.

The dressing for the salad has lime juice, Splenda or Stevia In the Raw Granulated Sweetener (or sugar if you don't care about it being sugar free), Green Tabasco sauce, and garlic, and the Umami flavor notes come from fish sauce. This Asian condiment (with a strong aroma but fantastic flavor) may be an unusual ingredient for some readers, but I'd never make this without it. (Thanks to Lydia for teaching me about Three Crabs Fish Sauce, which is now my favorite brand, and also to my step-sister Karyn for bringing me some Three Crabs Fish Sauce from San Francisco!)

Cut up cucumbers into bite-sized pieces. (I've made this with European cucumbers, garden cucumbers, and also small Persian cucumbers, and all were good. I wouldn't use waxy cucumbers from the grocery store for this salad.)

Whisk together the lime juice, fish sauce, Splenda or sugar, Green Tabasco, and garlic puree to make the dressing.

You can chop the mint, but my mint leaves were quite large so I sliced them into chiffonade strips.

Combine the cucumber pieces and chopped or sliced mint in a bowl, then stir in the dressing. Season to taste with salt and fresh ground black pepper.

Top the salad with a generous amount of chopped peanuts and serve immediately. (This salad doesn't keep very well, but you probably won't have any leftovers!)

Cut ends off cucumbers, then partially peel, leaving thin strips of peel in stripes along the cucumber. Cut striped cucumbers in half lengthwise, then in 1/2 inch slices. Wash mint, dry well and chop coarsely or slice into chiffonade strips. Coarsely chop peanuts.

Mix dressing ingredients. Combine chopped mint and cucumbers in plastic bowl, add dressing and stir a few times so cucumbers and mint are completely coated with dressing. Pour into serving bowl, season with salt and pepper if desired, sprinkle chopped peanuts over and serve immediately.

This doesn't keep well; the taste of the mint completely overtakes the other ingredients if it's refrigerated overnight, so make as much as will be eaten right away. (It might work to cut the cucumbers, chop mint, and mix the dressing and keep refrigerated for a few hours, but toss the salad together right before serving.)

Cucumbers are a great low-glycemic food choice, and with the substitution of Splenda for the sugar, this recipe would be perfect for any phase of the South Beach Diet, as well as mother other types of low-carb diet plans. Even if you used sugar, this still wouldn't have that much sugar in a serving.

I chose the South Beach Diet to manage my weight partly so I wouldn't have to count calories, carbs, points, or fat grams, but if you want nutritional information for a recipe, I recommend entering the recipe into Calorie Count, which will calculate it for you. Or if you're a member of Yummly, you can use the Yum button on my site to save the recipe and see the nutritional information there.

More Salad Ideas with Cucumbers:(Recipes from other blogs may not always be South Beach Diet friendly; check ingredients.)

(Want even more recipes? I find these recipes from other blogs using Food Blog Search.)

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37 comments:

Delicious, Kalyn! I've got a different version of spicy cuke and radish salad that I adapt from a Rachael Ray recipe -- spiced up cucumber is one of my favorites. If I can ever get past eating my naked cucumbers straight out of the garden this summer, I'll definitely try out your version. Maybe by then I'll have my mint back, too!

Sounds great! This is perfect since I just had a party with mojitos and happen to have some leftover limes and mint.

Just found your blog doing a search for Phase One recipes (it's been an indulgent summer and am going to get back on track tomorrow). Your recipes look great! I'm so glad I found your site--I think this will help a lot in my quest to lose a few pounds! Melanie

This really looks very tempting and sure is healthy as well. Will absolutely try this salad. It looks very fresh and the combination of ingredients here makes it a very promising dish to serve even to guests!

Stumbled onto this while looking for a fish recipe and it is SOOOOO GOOD!! Simple to make and the flavors are absolutely divine. Leftovers? I just added it all to a big salad and used as a healthy dressing! One of my new favorite recipes.

I made this today and it's great.....I did make a couple of changes to it though. I don't care for mint so I left it out and added about 1/2 t. of cilantro paste to the dressing. And instead of green Tabasco I used Siracha (sp) hot sauce. It's a very tasty salad and I will be making this again and again. :). Thanks Kalyn for another winning recipe.

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